“... cut off from basic supplies. The degree of deprivation differs markedly from siege to siege and may change from week to week. A woman from the town of Madaya, thirty miles west of Damascus, where 43,000 people are under siege from Hezbollah, told me she had been reduced to boiling up thistle-like plants she had picked by the roadside in order to feed her ...”

“... The difference between the Girard-Cadière case and the sexual abuse scandals of our own day, it may seem, is no more than a matter of media technology. Yet the trial itself turned on Cadière’s claims to have experienced miracles, visions and divine possession, and involved testimony obtained during an exorcism. Both Cadière and Girard were accused of ...”

“... but one of its enforcers. Most of China’s current leaders were in their adolescence when the 16 May Circular was drawn up in 1966. This document, issued by the central government as a nationwide instruction to Party officials, transferred responsibility for the ‘cultural revolution’ from the so-called Five Man Group chaired by Peng Zhen to the Cultural ...”

“... free black boy called Homer – sends her scrambling back on the lam. However formulaic it may be, the plot is propulsive, and the book is full of vivid images, learned allusions and astute observations, like this one about a white medical student-cum-bodysnatcher in New England: The other students uttered the most horrible things about the coloured ...”

“... there is no point in making it seem even more serious by taking it too seriously.’ Hartigan may not have entirely agreed. In the early 1950s Hartigan dated Walter Silver, who ended up documenting much of the scene, photographing readings, exhibitions, magazine launches and parties. There are photos of Hartigan learning to silk-screen, bent over the tray ...”

“... his allies viewed his survival as a providential blessing and political imperative. The civil wars may be considered a pivotal moment in British medicine, but victory and survival could still usefully be attributed to God. The​ final part of Battle-Scarred deals with ‘the hidden human costs’ of the civil wars – the psychologically damaged, the ...”

“... cries beautifully, he is talking about his daughter: ‘She is my great happiness.’ The beauty may be Isabel’s projection at the time: this man is courting her and he has lovely manners. The suspicious reader – or the informed rereader – will feel it is just part of Osmond’s nasty, cramped, aesthetic act. What the adverb isn’t – and the same ...”

“... relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job opportunities and promotion. Costlier spells may be sold to politicians seeking re-election, or to those who ask a sorcerer to exercise magical influence over a government official to force him to sign or refrain from signing a document – not an uncommon need, given that Iraqis spend large amounts of time ...”

“... sees his teetotalism as a reaction to his father’s drinking, just as his manic work rate may have been a riposte to his father’s fecklessness. On one estimate he wrote at least a quarter of a million letters and postcards. Joyce, also the child of a bibulous father, was something of a downstart too; but at least he belonged to the majority Catholic ...”

“... figures of Oedipus and Antigone, giving the interpersonal a social and political resonance, and it may be that the contemporary relevance of that project accounts for part of the timeliness of Quin’s reappearance. The other writings collected in The Unmapped Country cover, as far as can be told, something over ten years, and some are more interesting than ...”

“... Perhaps this is why she clung firmly to the painterliness of her paintings. Their compositions may sometimes be influenced by her design work, but their surfaces rarely are. Patches of colour are almost never flat or evened out in her paintings, brushstrokes are visible, sometimes pencil too, and planes are liable to fade and blend in and out of each ...”

“... the editors thought it would be too far-fetched for Western readers. Radical Chinese nationalists may also be happy to see Trump re-elected. They have nicknamed him ‘the nation-builder’, because he has improved Chinese understanding of American hypocrisy and rallied people round the flag.Claims of double standards, Western hypocrisy and whataboutism are ...”

“... a go of Moominpappa’s ambition to be a lighthouse keeper. Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea may well owe something to Poe. In it, the trolls find the lighthouse deserted, the light broken and on a table hundreds of tiny scratches in groups of six, with a seventh drawn through to mark the weeks: ‘Week after week all the same, except one which had only ...”

“... seedy men. The resourceful Hattersley women come out much better, and I fancy that the novelist may have had his view of things from some grandmother, or aunt. The story has a sharp edge of sexual spite to it. Similarly unsentimental, and presumably all his own, is Hattersley’s analysis of British industrial decline in the late 19th century. It is ...”

“... in the sense of what it means to be a Catholic: so this has to be addressed, however much we may feel – in Muriel Spark’s case, anyway – that the field has already been ploughed pretty thoroughly. Perhaps another way of approaching Spark’s fiction would be to consider the distinction between those novels which are written around a ...”